Frameset and Pagerank

How will a frameset influence PR?

[djgreg]

Imagine you have a site with PR6.
Now you want to realize the Menu in a frameset, so your index.html is splitted in menu.html and content.html .
Now what PR will be given to the frame sites?
The index.html without frameset would be 6 but what if the index is splitted as described above? Will both sites get PR6 or will they get PR5? or something else?

Any ideas?

[piskie]

Yes, don't do it for any reason.

[John_Caius]

The frameset page gets a PR. Pages shown within the frameset have their own individual PR (shown if you view the pages outside the frameset). The PR of each depends on how the site is linked together.

If the domain root (index.html) is a frameset then it will have the highest PR. Google will not be able to find menu.html or content.html as it can't spider frames, so they'll have a grey PR (0/10).

What you need to do is link to menu.html and content.html from the noframes content of the index.html frameset as googlebot can read noframes content. Assuming a drop in PR of 1 for each step away from the root URL, menu.html and content.html will have a PR of 1 less than index.html.

[julinho]

Page rank is assigned to pages, not sites.

A frameset is composed of several pages, each page with its own PR. The PR of a page doesnīt change, wether it is in a frame or not; if a menu page has a, e.g., PR5, thatīs the page rank which will be passed on, even if that menu page is within a frame of a index page with PR8.

To see the pagerank of a page in a frame: right click on that specific page; click properties; copy the URL of the page; paste URL in address bar; click Enter.

[John_Caius]

It's not difficult to optimise a frames site so that subpages get listed well in Google - you just do it through the noframes content. However, it is a bit more tricky to get the user to see the requested page in the context of the total frameset - you can do it with some cunning server-side programming I think, or link to the frameset at the bottom of each individual page so that the user clicks out of the orphan page and into the frameset from there.

[julinho]

Caius,

You beat me, literally, by seconds (look at the time stamps).

We said different things based on different assumptions, but I think we both are right.

Of course, I am always open to different thoughts.

[John_Caius]

Yes, I agree. :)

[djgreg]

Whoa, fast answers.

Are you sure that Google follows links in the noframes section? Because this is an argument, too.
If you have a frameset you can pass a lower PR to other domains as if you have no frameset, because you are only able to pass the PR of the index.html by putting (invisible) links in the noframes section.
Always provided that Google follows links in the noframes section.

[John_Caius]

Yes, googlebot spiders noframes content.